 And welcome to Discovery, a weekly series that's going to look at the creation of informed and engaged communities through the lens of artists and the arts. I'm Victoria Rogers and joining me today to discuss arts resilience and addressing systemic issues is Michael O'Brien. Thanks for joining me. Michael is my first guest so this is going to be a special one. Michael is an expert practitioner and budding researcher in the fields of community development, organizational culture and human well-being. Director of learning at the village of arts and humanities located in North Philadelphia. He's also an innovation fellow at Drexel University's Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation, a faculty member of the career studies department of the Curtis Institute of Music, and a board member of the Samuel S. Fells Fund and the Philadelphia Cultural Fund. Again, Michael, welcome. Thank you. Before we begin I want to acknowledge today is Juneteenth, the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the endering of slavery in the US. For our viewers please submit your questions for Michael using the Q&A button at the bottom of the screen. If on Facebook, noted in the comments and on Twitter, please hashtag nightlife. We'll address as many of your questions as we can. To begin, I want to read a quote from an article in the arts section of last Sunday's New York Times facing racism on another stage. Sarah Bellamy, artistic director of Penumbra Theater, an African American theater company located in St. Paul, Minnesota, was one of four African American theater figures interviewed. From Sarah, the most profound thing that we can practice right now is discernment. To be patient wherever we sit, whether we're an artistic director, a playwright, a producer, whether you're white or black, or whether you're emerging or at the pinnacle of your career, using discernment to figure out exactly what your most potent role can be. Mike, given a pandemic, the possibility of a new great depression, and a renewed civil rights focus, what's the most potent role for artists in the arts today? Yeah, I think that's a fantastic question. And again, Victoria, thank you for having me. I think there's a duality, right, of tension in the idea of discernment in patients, because while practicing discernment does take patience, we can't be idle, right? And so how do you balance the two? I think it's a very relevant question. And I think in that context, one of the things that we have to look at, and I'm really cheesy, so my shirt says innovate. And so, you know, it's being on brand, I think the moment for change is upon us. And I think that we really need to move away from the buzz phrase, buzz terminology, or buzz connotation around innovation, and get back to the core meaning of innovation and then think about the role of the arts and the artists and creatives in that fashion. And so this core idea around innovation is really that you're taking things not intended to solve, you know, a particular problem and using it in that fashion, right? So taking whole new tools and using them on old problems, taking old ways of, you know, making or doing a thing or a process around a thing and applying it to complex intersections of problems, we have an opportunity to reimagine how the artistic process, the creative process, the role of narrative can be used at a time when people are trying to make sense of injustice, people are trying to make sense of mass dehumanization that is taking place currently, but has been taking place for centuries, millennia even in many cases around the globe. And I think artists are well positioned to create a process of inclusionary narrative work, right? And an excavated narrative work that, again, is hitting the margins, it's hitting the intersections and provides low barrier access to that kind of participation and the kind of platform sharing for the voices who are typically, again, at the margins or in the intersections, get dehumanized or diminished. And I'm happy to dig into that further and make it even more contextual. Yeah, go ahead and do that because, you know, as you and I have talked before, who's behind a camera makes all the difference in a film, who has the right to tell the story, who's telling the story, completely changes the tenor of it and often the message of it. The article that I was reading Sarah's quote from was talking about that and there was another quote in there, hold on, I'm going to grab the paper because I thought it was really important, was by Jelani Aladdin. And one of his quotes was, how many white artists are given the chance to try and fail over and over again before becoming critical successes, which relates to your comment. Who has the right to tell the story, who has access to the facilities and what's needed to be able, the funding to be able to tell stories and, you know, ultimately, who's on that stage, whose voice is it? Yeah, so from, you know, I'm nerdy, admittedly. So from an anthropological and right storytelling is the methodology that all of our species has been using our ancestors, what I was going to say, but our species, our ancestors of our species have been using forever to make sense of complexity and particularly to make sense and make meaning out of the things that are out of our control, the things that happen that we have no idea exactly why but we have to figure out, right? In order to move to the next point in life. The other thing that narrative and story has done for our species historically and still in a contemporary sense is it operates as a way to indoctrinate your young into the social and cultural norms and the mental models and frameworks of the world that you're in. And so to dig into this question or this idea around like who's behind the lens, the power that's in that, who gets the right to fail, which is really we're talking about a human given right, right, the right to make mistakes, the right to fail, etc. The idea of the journey of power behind the lens, the journey of being able to critically fail over and over and over again in front of the lens or behind the lens until you reach critical mass and some sense making of your own world and the world around you and the business terrain to then move into the space of your success and move with that power. That's complex and we're not just there for talking about the right to story. We are actually now talking about the right to one's humanity, right? And that is a larger framing and larger question because we are patterning for others at a meta, you know, cultural sense, we are patterning and demonstrating to others, young people, people of color, black people, brown people, migrants who has access to human rights in the core of their being and in the context of our species and who doesn't. And it often goes unsaid, but the fascinating thing about our brains I'm into the science of imagination heavily. There's some fantastic books out there I can recommend later. But there's this fantastic thing about the imaginative faculty and the way that it works within human beings and that's you have symbols for complex series of symbols for words, a number of complex series of symbols for every word that you have in your vocabulary. But you also have a series of complex symbols for things that don't have words. So you can have, oh, Siri heard me say something. So you can have symbols and things represented for emotional experiences and for things that you're making sense of, but that you might not have an orientation of a language around, but it's still impacting how you frame and see the world. And so when we provide access to, again, this idea of the rights of your humanity through making and doing and business opportunities and seeing who gets to fail and who gets the right to make mistakes and learn from them, we have to be conscious of what we're seeding at a larger cultural level and whether or not that's actually what we're trying to put across to larger culture. So, you know, I know that some of your work has been in trauma informed community building, which in a way I think is going to relate to this. So when you think about good story telling and how it can transport us to another place or into another person's shoes, you know, it's that it can build empathy and build understanding. And asking a person to tell their story, let's others understand their perspective. But it also frequently asks a person to reveal events and situations that are incredibly painful. And, you know, that mere act of retelling something can retraumatize us. So when you think about building community through storytelling, how do you consider that balance between the two? A building empathy of a collective but protecting an individual at the same time? Yeah, so back on my nerd day, right? So I got really interested in the construct of empathy in my early 20s because I found that I heard people using the terminology and could tell like, I don't think we all mean the same things. So I said, well, let me go into the academic literature and see just like where the bearings are from like a very technical research base. And that dig, you know, reflected my own sense of processing and understanding, which was people, the researcher makes the construct, the researcher then, you know, makes the definition they're using and then builds their research tools around that definition. So there are some researchers that say that empathy is this, you know, based on this idea of emotional resonance, meaning that you can feel an emotional experience or the emotional state of another person. Some people or researchers would say that empathy is being able to recognize accurately that state of being in another person. And there are whole other groups of researchers that will say things like, none of that matters if there's no activity or behavior that results from a feeling or a recognition of someone else's emotional state. And that feeling or behavior is in service of that other person and puts their needs first, right? And so that was fascinating to me to be like, wow, we really don't all mean the same things. And if it's about behavior and activity, I thought about the fact that in the context of trauma informed community development or whatever terminology people like to use, you know, I repurpose that as like human centered community development, right? How do you put humanity forward? How do you put the well being of a human forward? How do you lead or design with the full human in mind, right? And so from that context, I look at my background in psycho education and I'm going to loop back around the empathy on this in a minute, but I look back at my background in studying what's called psycho education versus, you know, therapies. And to be clear here, psycho education is when you are learning about the impact that experiences in life have had on you, right? You're learning about the ways in which behavior, meaning making your worldview and mental models and frames on how you expect the world to work, how you manage yourself through expectations of your own like performance, et cetera. Psycho ed is in that world where you actually don't have to deal with the, I hate to say like this, the gory details of the trauma narrative. That's for therapy. That's where you're going to get into the deep dark parts of your narrative, right? But psycho ed is about learning how those things shape you. So you don't actually have to talk heavily about the literal gory details of the narrative, but you do get to, you learn first how people generically shift and systems and cultures and communities shift when they're exposed to chronic stress, chronic adversity, trauma, et cetera. Then you get to reflect on like how that might have shaped in your life. And then you get to process the emotional experience, but you don't necessarily have to fully process the narrative around the trauma. So when we get into spaces of story circles, et cetera, I like to orient people in those kinds of ways, give them a little bit of psycho ed and also share them that your narrative is your power. That's your story. People have to earn that from you. You don't have to just freely hand it out. If they haven't built trust with you as currency, then they have no credit to spend on you to receive your narrative, right? And that's your power and your choice. So back to this closing piece here, back to this part on empathy. What I found through digging through the research and in my practice is that if we actually start the journey of someone trying to build their empathic faculty or become more empathetic or become more sensitive to issues where they might have been immune and they didn't understand someone's experience, they don't understand the white person doesn't understand the black experience. As a cis male, I don't necessarily understand the experience of women, right? So I might be immune to the ways that that lived experience and that identity is impacting someone and trying to relate to someone on a social or identity-based factor that I don't have, it's impossible. I don't know what it's like to have cancer if I've never had cancer. And to assume that I can diminishes someone's narrative, which diminishes their humanity, which minimizes them as a person and their personhood. And it's hard to actually treat someone like a human if you minimize their personhood, right? And so we have to be careful of that. So the thing about empathy, if I'm selfish first, this is actually kind of backwards, if I'm selfish first, and if I can think about locating emotional experiences on the inside that are germane, not the social factor that came along with the emotional experience, but the emotional experience, powerlessness, helplessness, terror, shame, guilt, embarrassment, whatever, they don't have to be negative. I'm just picking the negative ones right now because they're visceral. If I can locate that on the inside, I can then use that as a way to project into the potential emotional experience of the person that I'm trying to empathize with. So rather than me trying to go like, oh, what does it like to be a woman? I can go, hmm, I know what it's like to feel powerless and helpless and like I have absolutely no control in a particular situation because of something that is legitimate that I cannot change about myself. What might it be like for this other person who might be going through the same thing? Might they actually be experiencing that emotional experience magnified to like the fifth, six or seven power even, because I don't understand that social factor. So I know from the beginning that even doing this emotional, emotional experiential projection into the life of another person, I know it's still limited, but it's a much better and more authentic starting place to bridge a relationship with another person than trying to match an identity point or a social factor that you just will never know. And from that place of any emotional experience, right, on the inside that I'm then projecting to the other, I can ask you questions, how can I show up as an ally? How can I show up as a better listener? I know what it's like to not be listened when I felt powerless. How can I actually show up and be of empathic service to another human being and another person? And that I think is the role that art can play when people don't have the words. They don't know what to say. You can use images, sounds, pictures. You can do all kinds of stuff. You can collaborate on images, sounds, and pictures. You can use your body and embody these things. And I think it's such a powerful tool that we are just under utilizing right now. Yeah, I'll stop there. That was a whole bunch. I think another conversation that you and I have had is, what's the impact on our ability to do this through segregation? You know, when you don't have that opportunity to have conversations and you don't have that opportunity, or haven't taken the opportunity, let me put it that way, to form the kind of relationships where you're willing to put yourself out there and you're willing to have that trust. I mean, just at night, one of my mantras is, frequently, we don't share a vocabulary. We talk about DEI. That may mean one thing to me and something to someone else. And I'm incredibly lucky to have a diverse field of colleagues that bring in really different perspectives to the work that we do and to their understanding of that work. And frankly, to our understanding of each other and then trying to work through, you know, what does that actually mean? And it's hard work. It is very hard work. But I think it's, I don't even think, it is completely and totally necessary work now, right? And it's one of those things where we are living the results of belief that the work is so hard that we should put it off. And I don't think many of us like these results, right? And so we are more segregated and Philadelphia is more segregated than it was under Jim Crow, right? This article ran on the cover of the Philadelphia Weekly back in about 2012, 2013. And it was shocking to the core. And so it's like, listen, clearly the law did not do that much, even though the law needed to change, policy needed to change. And so the question becomes, what are we willing to sacrifice, right, in order for the bettering of the whole? What are we willing to challenge ourselves on for the bettering of the whole? And I think the flip side of that, again, back to the art and the power of art making and the power of narrative and storytelling, you actually don't have to first start by building trust with another person. The first person you actually have to trust is yourself. You have to trust that your experience is valid in whatever context that it is. So I'm going to go for a hyper, you know, like, intense example. One of the things that I had to realize by the very definition of trauma, the very definitions of something called terror management, which is what happens to people and systems when they believe that death is imminent, that death is an actual factual thing that could occur almost any moment in their lives. When I look at the people that I traditionally consider to be like the abhorrent racist, right, when I listen to them, when I step out of myself and actually practice the empathy thing like I explained, and I listen to them, I'm like, actually, there's some legitimate fear there. Whether or not I feel like it's based on facts doesn't matter because the thing about trauma is that a trauma is when whatever is happening to you is overwhelming, your external or internal abilities to cope. The other definition in that boat is when you have a perceived or literal physical or emotional threat that makes you feel powerless, terrorless, excuse me, powerless, terrified, or you have a lack of control. When I listen to a lot of these folks, when I listen to poor world white people who live in Appalachia that have some of these views that I don't necessarily agree with, I listen to it, I'm like, well, there is legitimate fear there. And some of it's based on the fear mongering narratives that are being utilized by media and by large groups of people that have a large amounts of power. So how do we sit in that and begin the bridge people where the first step is people have to be validated in their story. And this is where this gets tricky and why I believe in truth and reconciliation work. People have to be validated in their stories and their experiences. You will not bridge these divides by starting with you're a liar and you're wrong. Whether that's with the most important races, whether that's with, you know, the most left leaning folks, whether it's black people, women, et cetera, you will, we will never build bridges if the starting places again, you're a liar and you're wrong or your opinion is invalid. Because truth is sense made from a series of facts. And to your point around language, everybody doesn't arrive at the same truth. Everybody doesn't have the same language or definitions and connotation attached to the same language, though we're talking with each other. So a lot of times people are just passing emotion back and forth, but they're not passing understanding back and forth and they're not able to build with one another. So again, the first step is before trusting others, we have to trust self. And then, then we can start to share our story out. And then there's a series of design steps. I think that could happen with people who are willing, who are from different groups to start bridging differences and nodal points of identity. So Mike, I've got a question from Kit on zoom that relates to this. It's saying the idea of empathy is taking action really chimes in with what I've been thinking. As we start engaging in new rounds of participatory budget discussions with our city governments, do you have any recommendations on which resources we can best advocate for to invigorate human based community development? So large question, right? I think it's not as you got to make sense of what has transpired in a space or a place to really understand what's happened and what people need from like a longitudinal end. None of that were and even in an immediate sense, none of that works if the people most impacted have no voice at the table, have no seat at the table or gas lit at the table. It will not work. And it's hard because again, if you so back to the science of imagination, things that are physically distant from a person, a human being, things that are socially distant from a human being or psychologically different distance, excuse me, from a human being, this includes identity, things that are distant, you will reason with in words, things that are proximal to you or close to you, be they again physical, social or psychological, which includes identity and our understanding of people's identity in the world, you will reason with them and picture and in metaphor. And that is visually physiologically more rooted in the emotional and empathic centers of the body and brain than words. That's why it's when people get relegated to line items and budgets, this is when we have a problem. It's easy to reason off the people that are distant from us into line items and budgets that are kind of ethereal. They don't have any emotional attachment to it and the impact of the empathic faculty is not going to naturally kind of be activated and stimulated in ways that again, picture and picture based metaphor will kind of move you. So closing those distances matters. So how could you use storytelling and narrative to make sense of history of space and place to make sense of policy over long periods of time as they have impacted space and place? There's opportunity to do multi-layered analysis around policy, public health outcomes, educational outcomes, history of space and place and people's lived experience and narrative to then make sense of the complexity that is a lack of humanity that is like widespread throughout all of our communities in this country. But I think it starts there again it goes back to if the people don't have a voice or a seat at the table or if they're just gaslit at the table and we use myths on them, the model minority myths, respectability politics and the myths they're in. We won't get much of anywhere. So Mike there's a lot of comments on Facebook affirming what you've just said but from Sandra on Zoom, what forms of art would you suggest doing that could help people relate to this? That's such a dope question. Couple of things. One, pictures, even stick figures. The goal here is to be embedded in process and in the making and in the generation of language and in the generation of images around concepts that are hard to make sense of or to put out to another person. It's fascinating how you can develop language for things that you draw pictures around and put in sequence. It's a whole thing called trauma art narrative therapy by a woman named Dr. Lyndra Bills. Fascinating process and fascinating results out of that process. So picture, huge one, storyboarding? Great. Because again the goal is not to every panel to be a Picasso. The goal is to get the narrative and the message in the box and then match it to the next narrative in point and moving it along and being able to move things around, being able to externalize something and play with it in time and make sense of it. Fascinating. Visualized timelines? Big thing. I think those are amazing to use in communities because entry points matter, like entry points to a subject matter, entry points to history, entry points to even making sense of what's happened around you in a neighborhood. I've worked on projects where we've had 80 year olds and 12 year olds and nine year olds all working on a place-based initiative around a basketball court and a playground that's been in the neighborhood for like 50, 60 years. But for the 14 year old whose friend got murdered on that court four years ago, they had a very different emotional relationship with that space in place. Then the 60 year old who got their first job there, met their wife there when they were 12, was a lifeguard there and remembers it as this amazing, amazing place. Who's right or wrong in that experience? Nobody, but it's very easy to get lost and right or wrong when what matters to you is your story and the validity of it. So making a timeline and having people add to it and being able to see it over time, adding clips from the news and different periodicals to it that people didn't even know about, I watched that be such a beautiful artistic process that everybody participated in, but also used as a way to release each other from the need to be right or wrong about the experience and honor that multiple truths can exist in the same space at the same time and so we can focus away from right and wrong and focus on shared humanity and the well-being of everybody in our neighborhood. Those are just two examples of some art way, arty ways to make things. So speaking of well-being and we're almost out of time, you've done this work for a lot of years now. How do you keep from getting tired? What are these things that you do that keeps you motivated and healthy so that you can do this work? You know, practicing vulnerability, right? Like I wasn't healthy for a moment, right? Like you can only work in trauma for so long before if you're not careful it starts to suck your life for us. So the last eight months I've had to dramatically change how I look at myself, do the work. You know, I have a friend that always tells me, Michael, it's a marathon, not a sprint. That became germane to me, that settled in my heart this year. And so a couple of things I do. I make sure I do something for my physical health every day. I make sure I do something for my mental health every day. I make sure I do something for my spiritual health every day. I make sure that I am creating experiences, emotional experiences for myself of joy, awe and wonder every day, every day. I invest in that. I invest in my friendships and my relationships. I have amazing friends who support me. I can dump on them. I can run outside with them. We can run down the street like eight-year-olds. We can make music together, right? I invest in the things that bring emotional experiences, again, of joy, awe and wonder. I heard this amazing phrase at a conference and this woman said, you know, you have to purposely schedule joy because trauma and tragedy schedules itself and that really shook me up. And I was like, that's right. So I also therapy. I believe in it. You know, you can't harbor the world's stuff and your own stuff and think that like the brain and body are meant to harbor all that. It's not. So I also just believe in therapy 100%. I'm with you there. So what last is from Helen on Zoom. She asked that you share some references for science of imagination. Yes. Actually, I have a wonderful book sitting right next to me. Can you see that? It's called Imagination, the science of your mind's greatest power by Jim Davies. That's a fantastic book. There's another fantastic book that actually deals with time, not imagination. It's called Homo Prospectus. I did not know we were going to do book recommendations as it happened to have them next to me because I'm a nerd. And I appreciate being a nerd. I encourage you all to embrace your inner nerd. It's a fantastic book called Homo Prospectus written mainly, well, there's four authors. If you look up Martin Seligman, S-E-L-I-G-M-A-N, you'll find it. But again, Homo Prospectus, but it's on time in the way that our species reasons with time, which wholly encompasses the imaginative faculty. Those are two fantastic books to start with. Michael, I cannot thank you enough. Thank you. It's a continuation of our ongoing conversations. But guys, please tune in next week for our next discovery discussion, Friday, June 27th at 1 p.m. Eastern. Your host will be Priya Sarkar, director of arts in conversation with Miami-based poet, writer, lyricist, and activist Ajemone and Clay Lord, Vice President of Strategic Impact at Americans for the Arts. The topic is Walking the Talk, Social Impact of the Arts. Thanks to you again for your insight, your perspective, your willingness to be on this with me and to everyone who took time out of their day to join us. We have many more questions. I'm sorry that we can't answer them. But I also wanted to say the music at the top of our show was done by a night colleague, Chris Barr, and our closeout is composed and performed by Akron's own jazz pianist, Theron Brown. I really hope to see you all next week. Michael, talk to you soon. Okay.